Labor Unions Now a Giant Bore

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There is a world, within the micro-left, that approaches the current political scene, sees “hope” in the archaic form of worker’s unions, now reduced to public sector unions in the US, and publishes stirring calls for activism within that form.

I belong to a public sector union. I am a shop steward in that union at my jobsite. I was elected (unopposed- no one else wanted to go) a delegate to the annual convention of the public sector union, and I went. Sort of.

The whole thing is a preposterous joke. My participation in it is out of sheer boredom, mixed with a little self-protection. And it gets me out of work a day or two, and I made a little money on the side through mileage claims and reimbursements. Get the joke?

The union is a platform for proselytizing and managerialism, The convention was studded with God-talk, god-fearin this and that, pledges of allegiance to a god, prayer, thank Jebus, halllujah all the time. I walked every time this nonsense started, getting a marathon in by the end.

2. Union activity has to be outside the workplace, so that it becomes, for all but the corrupt elected statewide officers, a money-losing proposition. Who wants to lose more time outside the time at work to be in the company of fellow deluded wage-slaves, who want to do nothing but talk about the very thing you abhor- the work?

3. The amount of bombastic, specious uplift at the convention was enraging. Listening to a corporate-friendly clown like Randi Weingarten do her screamin’ and testifyin’ act, while on her way to the BDS-sanctioned state of Israel, was like being in church.

4. Public sector unions have no leverage, are in bed with gigantic trans-national corporations through their pension funds, and support the supersystemic order as a matter of logic and charter. The union halls in our Rust belt cities lie in ruins, echoing with the impassioned voices of the immigrant past, like the homes in Pompeii before the deluge. Let us bow our heads together to recognize their death.